Tricks and Manners

Colette Wolff on Flickr

2012-01-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

I started a group on Flickr for pictures of any projects made with Colette Wolff patterns. I hope to upload some scans of her cover-art to it too.

If you've found this blog while searching for Colette Wolff or Platypus Patterns, I hope you'll upload pictures of dolls or other things you've made from her patterns.

Penelope the Third

2012-01-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

I'm about sick of reading books, classics or no. So I made another Penelope doll. Penelope is a pattern designed in the 1980s by Colette Wolff of Platypus Patterns, a name sacred to cloth dollmakers. She is to be outfitted and wardrobed and bestowed on a small grand-niece. As you see, a first skirt is done; a fleece poncho is on the cutting table. Since she's going to a modern young lady, she shall have a modern ensemble.

States I've Visited...

2011-10-27T11:26:00.001-07:00

visited 20 states (40%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or Free ipad travel guide

Unpalatable and Indigestible

2011-08-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

July and August have been difficult months for classics reading.

The most pressing business was to finish Ulysses, which I had started reading in May. By the beginning of August I was only halfway through it; on vacation I dragged it all over the Upper Peninsula but read not a word of it. But now it's done, or as I'm tempted to say, it's "beastly done." When September comes, it will be wonderful to kick it around with my book discussion group and see what everyone else made of it.

With Ulysses underway, I needed a few other titles for respite reading, but they didn't work out well--not a one of them.

--Pickwick Papers / Dickens. I'm on Chapter 25. Oh how I hate this book. Flopping and flapping, random and inconsequent, trumped up, sticky, and Not That Funny, Pickwick Papers is taken up only to be flung down again with grumpy grunts. Why do I keep at it? Sigh. To fulfill a cherished childhood ambition to read all of the titles in the Whitman classic card game "Authors," of which Pickwick Papers might not even be the least palatable title. Washington Irving isn't all fun and Ichabod Cranes, you know. At his worst he can make your eyes drop right out of your head.

--House of Mirth / Edith Wharton. Okay, this book is not such a punishment to read as Pickwick and does not thwack your brains out like Ulysses. And I have got past the appreciation-impeding mistake of thinking Lily Bart is a romantic heroine. But still it's disagreeable to go at--every session it sinks a little lower. She reminds me of Anna Karenina in throwing away more resources than she can afford.

--Can you Forgive Her / Anthony Trollope and New Grub Street / George Gissing. I downloaded the LibriVox readings of these and started in on them, but so far they have failed to hook and reel me in. I think they will, though, given more time.

There now! Now I'm feel reinvigorated and ready to run at Pickwick again, now that the back cover of Ulysses is slammed shut!

Vacation Note

2011-08-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

Got poison ivy again--on the same shin. But this time it wasn't ironic: when you get poison ivy in a place clearly labeled "Wilderness State Park," you can't claim surprise.

But this time it wasn't so bad. I saw the plant this time, near the beach in the woods on the path between the bathrooms for the men and for the women.* So I washed it off in the lake.

* Hah! Six consecutive prepositional phrases! I've been reading too much Joyce.

Ironic

2011-07-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

I got poison ivy--in Manhattan.

Take my advice: if you walk up the green hill to the Cloisters, watch out! Better yet, take the bus.

A Favorite Painting from the Brooklyn Museum of Art

2011-07-10T15:49:00.000-07:00

The Sisters / Abbott H. Thayer, 1847-1921

A Gallop Through Hardy and Trollope in May

2011-06-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

It was a modest month for book-reading--or at least, for book-finishing. The Last Chronicle of Barset took a long time to get through, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Then I started listening to Kipling's Just So Stories, but hadn't quite finished it before the first of June arrived.

Also started reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I hope to finish this month.Remember when the movie "Tess" with Nastassja Kinski came out in the 70s? Ray and I went to see it the night it opened here. Pretty picture to look at, but such a sad story! I vowed then never to read the book, and renewed that vow as recently as a few months ago when a friend was asking me about the plot line

So why did I change my mind? Mmmmm, I know some of the reasons but maybe not all of them. One was that I really liked Far From the Madding Crowd and wanted to read more Hardy no matter what. Another was a desire to toughen up a bit and get over my aversion to sad books--at least sad classics, anyway. And finally, I was curious to see how he did it--how he told the story whose general lines I already knew.

Now I'm at the midpoint of the book: Angel Clare is pressing her to marry him, but she hasn't given in yet. She will. Poor doomed girl, poor sufferer.

I've continued my gallop through Trollopes this month--been lucky to find copies of various titles at the Friends' and other bookstores. Once I planned to read just a few of the Barset books, then just the that series... Heck, I'm in for all fifty, now! Toss me some o' thum Eustace Diamonds! Apparently there's an old saying that Trollope lovers dread the day they finish the last of his books. I get it--I totally get it.

An Unquestionably Happy Birthday

2011-05-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Is May 7 actually the one true perfect date for a birthday, or is my lifetime of conditioning in operation here?

Oh well, however it may sound to you, for me May 7 was a good day 54 years ago and it was another good day today too.

Weather-warners called for rain today, glooming our plans for a trip to Meijer Gardens. But we went anyway and were glad, because the sky was a perfect blue with clouds wispy and high, and the air was warm and the wind soft, and the trees nodded and the grass was a green delicious. Today butterflies still throve though past their time in the butterfly garden: on the way out, you pirouette for the docents to check your back lest you ferry a creature away.

We saw cactus and pear trees, magnolias in flower, giant aloes and weeping pines. We shot plastic boats over the falls in the Great Lakes Fountain, played with pioneer toys in the Log Cabin, and contemplated the statue of the Mad Mom.

In the sculpture garden we saw an Alexander Calder anticipating Lisa Simpson, and a Rodin Eve mourning for Adam, and a Joan Miro being so chic and surprising, and the famous "high horse" you've heard tell of:

There is more at Meijer Gardens than a 54-year-old can walk around without weariedness, even one who was born on such a day as this. So when our arches were stinging, we got back in the car, and we drove away, and we drove away.

Grateful thanks to Meijer Gardens photographers for overlooking the use of these pictures on this blog as we forgot our camera. Everyone should visit the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids Michigan. Especially on May 7 if you can.

A Child of Air

2011-05-01T18:07:00.000-07:00

The final poem in A Child's Garden of Verses, and one of my favorites:

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees

You playing round the garden trees,

So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

--Robert Louis Stevenson

Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination"

2011-04-20T17:57:00.000-07:00

The contents of this story collection, 1903 version, from Google Books:

So far I've read six of the twenty-two stories. Modern versions I've seen contain only ten. Not sure if I'll ever get through this longer list because genre doesn't appeal to me very much. Gave up on Dracula entirely--too high a Shudder Quotient--eeesshh!

Pickwick Update

2011-04-09T17:14:00.001-07:00

I'm liking Pickwick Papers so much better now that Sam Weller has entered the story. He's just what it needed--someone with a real personality instead of just the conceit of one.

The Passage of Time in Hardy's Wessex

2011-04-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

In London, twenty or thirty-years ago are "old times"; in Paris ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase. In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity.

Far From the Madding Crowd, Chapter 22
Thomas Hardy

The Joys of Librivox

2011-04-02T19:40:00.000-07:00

This month I tried out Librivox for the first time. I knew it was a huge collection of public-domain books read by volunteers and available free of charge, but I didn't know how huge, or how well-structured it is. My choice of Barchester Towers in podcast form downloaded smoothly and lodged itself as desired in my iTunes folder under Music / Audiobooks--in the correct order, too, instead of reverse order as other podcasts do. Each chapter is a separate file--very convenient!

Most of the titles I looked into were collaborations; that is, the whole book is not read by only one reader, but by as many different readers as signed up for it, chapter by chapter. All but one of the readers I liked, and most of them I liked very much. Overall the quality of reading was more than satisfactory--much of it was just as entertaining as anything to be found on Audible.com.

Tonight I had the pleasant task of choosing a new Librivox book to listen to. I could have stayed up all night browsing lists and auditioning readers, but that would only delay getting started, so I settled on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. This title was available in both collaboration and solo versions; I picked the solo version, read in a charming, masculine, Irish voice.

Since Overdrive, too, had a book available for me, I also downloaded Bernard Malamud's The Natural. So now I have puh-lenty to listen to and can get a simultaneous equivalent puh-lenty of knitting done, in between sessions of reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway using another modern convenience: my spectacles.

Oliver Twist

2011-03-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

Having long ago sampled both Oliver Twist and Pickwick Papers, I intended to leave them forever un-read. I love many other Dickens books, but Twist seemed overwrought and sentimental, while Pickwick is nothing if not funny, and isn't funny.

Van Reid wrote Pickwick the way it should have been written in his "Moosepath League" books. It's so entertaining to watch how his clueless characters never come to any harm; their innocence is impermeable armor--and they don't even know they're wearing it. But Pickwick comes to one scrape after another, which is annoying.

But it happened that Oliver Twist was the best audiobook title available on OverDrive the day I needed one. Also, it is one of the books listed in the Authors card game of which I have vowed to read each and every one. So I listened to it, must have been 17 or 18 hours worth of it, and after the half-way point began to enjoy it pretty well.

It was darker than I expected, going far beyond, as it does, mere cruelty to orphans, and not spooning them enough gruel. Tell you what--it's not likely to be read by modern school children. First, Dickens insisted on referring to Fagan as "the Jew" in the same way that he referred to Bill Sykes as "the housebreaker" and "the murder." And there is no sense that Dickens himself is actually above it and only employing it for the same reasons Twain used racial epithets in Huckleberry Finn. Another unfortunate reason is the character of poor Charley Bates, whom Dickens would invariably address as "Master." As Huck would say, "It warn't good judgment."

Once I started Oliver Twist, I commenced reading serial installments of Pickwick on Daily Lit. It's on the Authors list too--in for a penny, in for a pound!

A Room With a View

2011-03-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading A Room With a View today, and I cheered out loud when Lucy Honeychurch broke off her engagement with the odious Cecil. (That's not really a spoiler--when you see how he acts you know she can't possibly marry him unless they migrated to another novel.)

I'm glad she lived up to her Beethoven, victoriously played, and that she chose beautiful over delicate.

Next up: Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford and continuing slowly with Pickwick Papers on Daily Lit.

Winner Take Nothing: Finished After 42 Years

2011-02-17T15:37:00.000-08:00

This is the copy of Winner Take Nothing I bought around 1969 and never read--somehow it survived while many better-loved possessions slipped away. Inside the back cover I wrote my name in trying-to-be-grown-up cursive, with my address and junior high school.

Back then, as I have said, I wanted to own books, especially books by authors whose names were famous and had a majestic sound. Shakespeare. Chaucer. Hemingway. Steinbeck. James Fenimore Cooper. Some fatalistic mood must have attracted me to this title and I seriously intended to read it.

But now the idea of trying to read it at age 12 is comical. I wouldn't have had any idea of what was going on in most of these stories, and not just because of all the French in them. For example, there's "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" in which a boy tries to castrate himself: at 12 I didn't know what castration was and the dictionary definition could not have enlightened me. Nor would the subtler events of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" meant much to me: I'd have read that the man was old, deaf, and alone with as little response as I'd also read, around the same time, that Allie Caulfield had died--would have seen them as random details to fill in the story and then wondered, coming to its end, why it didn't make much sense to me.

So I'm glad that in my ignorance I left Winner Take Nothing alone. Or I could be kind and say wasn't it very wise of my younger self to leave it alone, but save it on the shelf these many years, awaiting le jour convenable for understanding it better, and also, a little French?

Cooper's Deerslayer: finished after 43 years

2011-02-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

In the farmhouse where my grandparents lived, there was an attic with a small book closet at one end. The only light was a naked light bulb protruding from a sloping gable; the only way to turn it on was to step into the darkness and grope blindly upward for the pull-string. My sister and I did not frequent it--there were many less scary places to play.

But around age 11 or 12, when I began wanting, badly, to own books, I visited the old book closet to see what treasure it might yield. It was still unnerving--the crowded orange-crate shelves tipped and crooked, dusty books slipping off them into more dust, and who knows how many creepy unseen creatures retreating as the light tinked on. But it was also rewarding. Right out in front was a green-backed set of novels-- the Leatherstocking Saga of James Fenimore Cooper, still standing in order: The Deerslayer. The Last of The Mohicans. The Pathfinder. The Pioneers. The Prairie. Very excited, I gathered them up and took them downstairs to ask Grandpa if I could have them.

I knew he would say yes. He was barely attached to anything in the house anymore, and he indulged his grandchildren. I waited while he looked the books over, wiped a little dust off them, checked the title--"Hmmh!"--of each one. Perhaps he was thinking how little leisure time farming chores had left him for reading the books under his own roof, for they lived not only in the attic book room but in almost every room in the house. And then he said, "Take 'em home!"

And I'm sure he must have said something funny about them, too, and made me laugh, if only I could remember it, because that's what he did so often: he'd find us doing something unremarkable, like gazing up at the stars, (because they were so much brighter up north, in the country, in the cold) and he'd just casually pay out a remark-- "Well, don't let the night fall on you," --and then wander off and be manifestly thinking about something else while you were still cracking up at the crazy unexpectedness of him.

The Deerslayer had been tortured: mice had nibbled or scratched away a wedge of pages--you couldn't read a whole line of text until after the third chapter. My mother was not excited about having it in the house. But I wasn't so fastidious: it was a book! One of a matched set of books! By a famous author! They got the best spot on my own bookshelf, which by coincidence was also an orange crate, but painted and sturdy, and I have treasured them from that day to this.

Though they are no longer actually in my house, and though I had to buy a new copy of Deerslayer when I finally decided to read it this year, both the stories and those particular books are precious to me. As I was reading, just a few hours ago, the very exciting ending of the story, I pictured my aunts, my uncles and my father, all departed now, reading it before me and telling me with that sly half-smile they all shared, "Yes, this is the good part."

Steady Progress

2011-02-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

Finished reading Jane Eyre today, but still have four other books currently en train:

Print: The Deerslayer (long-term because it's long and a teensy bit difficult to follow and maybe not quite so absorbing as other titles, but it's still good.)

DailyLit on email: Just started Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. Something odd about the narrator.

iPod listening: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (part 5 of 8, from The Classic Tales Podcast)

Book on CD: Around the World in Eighty Days (last read in high school, now enlivening my sewing room cleaning. Yes I am still doing that.)

All excellent and recommended!

Riding Out the Snowstorm

2011-02-01T18:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a screenshot of the storm that's hitting us tonight. Supposed to continue through tomorrow too, only moreso. Fortunately we all got home safely before it started blowing: my prayers are with Matthew who is "essential personnel" and has to go out in this tonight.

The Catcher in the Rye

2011-01-30T17:05:00.000-08:00

Rats, I couldn't listen to The Purloined Letter as planned--that disc is damaged also. So I put on a recording of John Cheever stories and listened Meryl Streep reading The Enormous Radio, and that was great but afterward I did not want to hear any more Cheever stories just then.

"I just didn't feel like it, if you want to know the truth. I really didn't..." Instead I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, very sad too, but in a different way than the Cheever. You hope old Holden won't grow up to be like Cheever. But he might.

A Few Words from Irving and Poe

2011-01-30T06:38:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I spent much of the day in my sewing room, going through quilting magazines and tearing out the patterns to be kept. These will go into file folders in a file cabinet, leaving me more room on the bookshelves and in the closet, where there are many, many magazines taking up space.

But that task doesn't require my whole attention: listening to recorded books improves the hours. I've listened to two, so far: The Washington Irving Library (on cassette) though old, is worth mentioning because of the pleasure of hearing his work read by Elliot Gould, Efram Zimblist, Jr, Jamie Farr, and Susan Anspach.

I didn't care for Rural Life in England very much because it was so generalized, nothing was ever described in particular. But the short fiction was very good; I like the folktale effect he does so well. I had already read Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow before, but not the Spectral Bridegroom or the other pieces.

Fortunately (?) there is still lots more work to be done on the sewing room, giving me hours and hours of opportunity to listen to classics. Next up was Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin stories. The first of these, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, is considered to be the first true detective story and Dupin, with his method of "ratiocination," the precursor of Sherlock Holmes. If I had not known this was so, I'd be ready to take Rue Morgue as satirical. There is a certain element about it that would seem to be poking fun at the genre.

I'm partway through The Mytsery of Marie Roget and still have The Purloined Letter to look forward to. Without these recorded books to entice me, I doubt if I'd pursue my cleaning chores with such assiduity.

Classic Authors A--Z

2011-01-29T05:51:00.001-08:00

I'm still missing a few letters... Time to read something by Zola!

Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Balzac: Pere Goriot
Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Dickens: Great Expectations
Eliot: Adam Bede
Forster:A Passage to India
Grahame: The Wind in the Willows
Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables
Irving: Rip Van Winkle
James: The Turn of the Screw
Kipling: Captains Courageous
Lewis: The Screwtape Letters
Melville: Moby Dick
Nabokov: Lolita
Orwell: 1984
Proust: Swann’s Way
Q
Rand: Atlas Shrugged
Scott: Ivanhoe
Tolstoi: Anna Karenina
Updike: Rabbit Run
Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days
Wharton: The Age of Innocence
X
Y
Z

In Which I Become a Janeite

2011-01-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

At five minutes past two o'clock in the afternoon today, I finished reading Mansfield Park, the only one of Jane Austen's novels I hadn't yet read. I am now officially a Janeite.

For, let's see, 39 years I had read only Pride and Prejudice. Romance isn't my favorite genre; an occasional re-reading of the arch-witted P & P was all I asked from it. Then just a few years ago, I finally read another Austen, Persuasion, which I liked well enough but did not light a fire in me to polish off the rest of them.

Next I read Sense and Sensiblity, only because I had been reading Adam Sexton's Master Class in Fiction Writing and the author required me to read for discussion purposes, so I did. (Though, actually, I forgot to go back and see what Sexton said about it.) Again I liked it well enough, but again no fires lit. It seemed to me Jane's other creations paled in comparison to the robust P & P.

But eventually it occurred to me that I was halfway to having read All, and to have read All seemed such a worthy goal, and one I had planned for myself way back in 8th grade, right after finishing the first. So then I read Emma, and ho ho, Emma is not a bit pale! Emma is quite robust! And so immediately on to Northanger Abbey, which was clever and fun. And lastly Mansfield Park, which is now my favorite after P & P.

Having finished the major six, shall I pursue the minor works, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon? I don't know. It's something to think about for another 39 years.

A Little Reminder that Life is Good

2011-01-26T15:24:00.001-08:00

Little

2011: My year of reading classics

2011-01-25T16:18:00.000-08:00

It was a decision made of centrifugal force: I had started reading two classics late in December, I finished them in January, along with three more classics. So now, with this impetus at work, what should I now do but make 2011 my year for reading classics? I don't swear they'll be only classics that I read; maybe just mostly classics. If Laurie R. King publishes another Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes this spring, I'll have to read it. But other than that--classics.

They don't have to be canonical, though. Could be classics of their genres, such as the Dorothy Sayers mystery I listened to last weekend while cleaning the sewing room. (For the two or three people who know that I began my first blog in 2007 with cleaning my sewing room: no it's still not done.)

So what have I read? This is what I've read:

Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoi (the new translation.) I found it in the Goodwill while Emily was looking for old Babysitter Club books and started reading it to pass the time, and couldn't put it down.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain. For the Classics Revisited discussion group. Read it simultaneously with Anna Karenina, and yes they are thematically related, don't laugh. In AK, Levin discovers that a moral sense is innate: if you live in accordance with it, you are happy and content in the world. If you do not, as Anna does not, your character degrades and you finish by destroying yourself. Huck Finn learns, as he wanders off to the woods to think things over, just as Levin does, to listen to his innate moral sense even when the "good" people in society would say he's wicked or mistaken.

Emma / Jane Austen. I started reading this in serial emails from www.DailyLit.com until I got thoroughly absorbed in it, then I switched to book form and finished it. Now I have only Mansfield Park left to read, and then we'll all be Janeites together and it's all feasting and fun.

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley Listened to B. J. Harris read this on Classic Tales podcasts, and what a marvelous job he does!

Clouds of Witness / Dorothy Sayers. As stated, a classic mystery, and a thumping good read, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, than whom no one pokes about and solves a murder in better style, don't you know--eh what, old thing? (Pop Quiz: And what Bible verse does this title make reference to? Correct--Hebrews 12:1 "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us..." )

And what am I reading now? These:
Mansfield Park / Jane Austen (by serial email from DailyLit)
The Deerslayer / James Fenimore Cooper (one copy at home and one at work so I don't have to keep toting it back and forth)
The Mysterious Affair at Styles / Agatha Christie, another very classic mystery, read to me by the incomparable B. J. Harris.

On deck:
Murders in the Rue Morgue | Mystery of Marie Roget | The Purloined Letter / Edgar Allan Poe (book on cd)
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde / Robert Louis Stevenson (Overdrive recorded book transferred to iPod)

Starting Here, Starting Now

2011-01-25T15:54:00.000-08:00

My original thought for this blog was to move over all my old posts from my typepad blog, to which I'd moved all my old posts from my vox blog when vox died... But it's too much of a nuisance. If I have to do all that, I'll never post anything fresh.

So if I and you want to look back at any parts of my erstwhile blog, here's the link:

http://www.tricksandmanners.typepad.com/

The Story of the Fabric of Life

2010-11-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

December 15, 2006

The first job in organizing the sewing room mess is to deal with the fabric. This is not a strategic choice, it is a defining choice. If I don't re-bond with this fabric, then I have to stop calling myself a quilter. Many thousands of dollars were spent on it, so pitching it and rebuilding another stash is not an option. Either I love this fabric and yearn to work with it, or I give up the idea entirely and clear it all out. Heaven knows I could use the space for other activities, such as walking and sitting.

I used to make a lot of quilts and wall-hangings, I even used to work in a quilt store. But when my son was born in 2000, there wasn't so much time available for sewing. Then in 2004 I started grad school to get my librarianship degree, and there was no time at all for sewing. I buckled the Bernina into its case and moved it off the desk top.

Now grad school is completed and my son is old enough to amuse himself near by me, if I don't mind a few Power Rangers, Spidermen, and Sponge Bobs underfoot. So I can quilt now--but it's been a long time. Do I still want to? Do I still have the fire in the belly for quiltmaking? The answer is spilling out of these fifteen or so large tubs spread around the room.

So I open up a tub as big as a cedar chest and begin.

The colors, sorted long ago, are now all mixed up. Big pieces smush the littler ones so that all are wrinkled. I pull out about 20 pieces at a time, smooth them and sort them by size. I iron the little pieces and sort them by color, to be put in their own ziplock bags. Everything 1/8 of a yard or under goes into them. The larger pieces go by color into fresh new plastic baskets.

It feels very soothing to be working quietly in this way. For a few weeks, I get up half an hour earlier in the morning to spend awhile here. After many mornings, the first tub is finished and I start the next.
Other times of the day, after work especially, I listen to podcasts of Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" while ironing and sorting this pile that seemingly never diminishes. But when my son is with me, he won't listen to "that guy," so we put on Christmas music cds, often hitting the "repeat" button on Alvin and the Chipmunks' Christmas Song. He also likes Fleetwood Mac and a disk of Halloween tunes, so we get a break from the Chipmunks.
Sorting through the fabric brings back many memories... This piece I bought at that quilt store just over the Kentucky border, that one came from a store up north that had a wonderful Samoyed named "Winston" and my daughter got to pet him while I shopped. I remember the collections some pieces came from, and how excited we were when they arrived at the shop: the first Smithsonian collection, the first one from Country Threads, a new Jinny Beyer, the Hoffmans that always just flew off the bolt.

They also bring back memories of what I made with them and what I dreamed of making with them. I always had more ideas than time. When my daughter Emily was young, I let her use my fabric to make scrunchies for her hair or various doll accessories. Sometimes I run across a piece of fabric that bears her mark (a hole cut out of the exact middle) and I have to show it to somebody so we can laugh. And sometimes I come across some complete mysteries: there's a hunk cut off this piece, but what on earth did I make with it? And what happened to it? A few things I sold, many more I gave away. I guess I've forgotten them.

My only records are rags.... Well, if I stay a quilter, I'll keep better records. After all, I'm a librarian now.